Maybe it never ended.
Yesterday, the House Interior Subcommittee of the Appropriations Committee marked up its initial FY 2013 funding legislation, and once again it put the budgets of the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities on the chopping block. Both agencies were allocated a $132 million, a decrease of $14 million, or 9.6%, from the FY 2012 actual level of $146.3 million.
Americans for the Arts blogged that “While the arts community recognizes the challenges our elected leaders face in prioritizing federal resources, this budget proposal is disappointing as funding for the NEA has already been cut by more than $20 million over the past two years,” and said the reduction was “counter intuitive to the national call to help increase jobs and fuel the country’s recovery.” Then it referred readers to its Arts and Economic Prosperity IV study, which estimates the contribution made by the “nonprofit arts industry” to economic activity at $135.2 billion annually and 4.13 million jobs.
President Obama had proposed an increase of $8 million to the Endowments’ budgets: $154.3 million.
Americans for the Arts and the National Humanities Alliance are urging those who care to write to their congressional representatives.
For perspective, meanwhile, the NHA put together this nice chart of 15 years worth of appropriations for the NEH, which track the NEA’s. (If it cuts off on the right, you can view this NEHFundingTable.)
Table: NEH Annual Appropriations (in millions of dollars)
| Fiscal Year | ‘95 | ‘96 | ‘00 | ‘01 | ‘02 | ‘03 | ‘04 | ‘05 | ‘06 | ‘07 | ‘08 | ‘09 | ‘10 | ‘11 | ‘12 | ‘13 |
| Appropriation | 172.0 | 110.0 | 115.3 | 120.0 | 124.5 | 124.9 | 135.3 | 138.1 | 140.9 | 141.1 | 144.7 | 155.0 | 167.5 | 154.7 | 146.0 | n/a |